Life of Brian

We had breakfast at Fatz. The restaurant itself doesn’t do breakfast, but they do allow worthy causes to use the building, with their guidance, to raise money by holding pancake breakfasts. A coworker’s church was raising fund’s for missionary work, so we bought a couple tickets.

Afterwards we did our weekly grocery shopping. As Donna put away our purchases, I went to start painting the computer room, but I didn’t have a paint tray… I had tossed it out after the gray wall paint because I was going to buy a new larger one to match the larger liners I had accidentally bought and never did. Donna said while you are out, you might as well get some milk too because we forgot to get that on this morning’s shopping.

When I got home she greeted me at the door and said, “The kitchen sink isn’t draining.” We spent the next 15 minutes looking for the plunger we just knew we had. After checking everyplace we could think of, I was preparing to go to the store for the third time this morning, when Donna found it in an unexpected place in the garage.

After five minutes of upper body workout with the plunger with no success I got a bucket and loosened the waste line from the garbage disposal. It, along with the trap, were full of water, but no clog. I tried using my little barbed snake thing, but it only went in the line into the wall a little way before running into the 90 degree bend and stopping ineffectively. I then knew I was going to the store for the third time. Needed some Liquid Plumr. Put the waste line back together and grabbed the car keys.

I poured half a bottle of pungent viscous goo down the drain. Waited 15 minutes and the water level hadn’t moved down. So the other half of the bottle went in and another 15 minutes later, same results. Time to call in the other kind of liquid plumber (the human body being approximately 70% water.)

We first called our usual plumber and their on the phone estimate scared us off. Plumber #2 was an answering machine and plumber #3 spent 3 minutes explaining to me how expensive it would be for him to come out on a weekend. We bit the bullet, called plumber #1 and said come on out.

He spent the first hour on the roof running his mini-snake down the kitchen vent to no avail. Then he crawled under the house to see if there was a solution down there. And when I say crawl, I mean crawl. When you first go under our house there is about 4 feet of room from the dirt to the floor joists, but it shrinks quickly. By the time you get to the kitchen is is about a foot and a half and there is all that HVAC dust work to squeeze over or under to get there. The only option left was digging a hole. The kitchen drain is a separate line that goes out from the house and then it drops down and joins the main line, this is here the problem was. After 55 years this junction had become totally plugged. I guess because of the distance from the sink and the size of the pipe it could hold quite a bit of water so that we didn’t notice that gunk was building up and narrowing the opening.

It did cost us a chunk of change to have him come out, but we got our money’s worth. He spent almost 4 solid hours working on this fix and it was raining on him the whole time.